The riskiest SpaceX stock trade of all had a big first week
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- SpaceX triggered a leveraged ETF land grab, with 11 competing products launched within days of its IPO and over $10 billion in levered ETF trading during the four-day holiday week, with Tuesday peaking at $4.2 billion in volume.
- Leverage Shares led the pack, posting three straight days above $1 billion in its 2X Long SPCX Daily ETF (SPCH), which finished the week at $4 billion in volume, while its short counterpart (SSPC) hit $2.56 billion.
- SpaceX turned negative in the second half of the week after two opening days of gains, putting many post-IPO retail buyers on the verge of being under water and exposing the daily-reset risk of levered products.
- Leverage Shares priced its SpaceX ETFs at a 0.75% expense ratio, undercutting peers like GraniteShares at 1.50%, though GraniteShares CEO Will Rhind argued the fee gap is irrelevant for short-term holders.
- Defiance ETFs was the only leveraged product actually trading on IPO day, with co-founder Sylvia Jablonski framing the SpaceX fund as a natural extension of its single-stock leveraged lineup tied to names like Strategy and Rocket Lab.
- Fund executives told CNBC they are already preparing to lever up Anthropic and OpenAI shares once those companies IPO later this year, signaling the single-stock ETF arms race is not a one-off SpaceX phenomenon.
Why it matters: The $10 billion first-week levered ETF haul on a single newly-public stock is unprecedented in scale, and the products' daily-reset mechanics mean retail buyers who chased SpaceX's opening gains could see compounding losses if volatility persists — exactly the risk Leverage Shares' own Paul Marino flagged. With OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs on deck, the fee war (0.75% vs. 1.50%) and product proliferation are likely to repeat at the next mega-debut.
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